15 March 2015 12:01 AM

Actually it does matter that the two main party leaders are forced to face each other in televised debates, each of them alone and cut off from the aides and scriptwriters who would otherwise whisper into their ears and make them look cleverer than they are.

Such events are the last faint trace of the raucous combative debate that politics used to be in this country.

It is incredible now to recall that, 51 years ago, the skeletal, hesitant aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home braved a furious 7,000-strong audience at the Birmingham Rag Market, a traditional ordeal for party leaders that he felt honour-bound to undergo.

His Labour rival, Harold Wilson, did likewise.

But can you remember when you last saw a major politician heckled? These days, audiences are screened to prevent it and offenders are dragged from the hall by heavies, as poor old Walter Wolfgang was when he dared to shout ‘nonsense’ – quite accurately – during a speech on the Iraq War by the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

And it is nearly incredible to note that, in quite recent Election campaigns, party leaders faced daily unscripted press conferences from an unvetted crowd of uncontrollable reporters.

These events had almost vanished at the last Election (I think David Cameron gave three in the entire campaign).

Entry to them required security vetting. Most of those who attended were members of the Parliamentary Lobby, that mafia of mutual flattery in which politicians and journalists eat so many lunches together that it becomes impossible to tell them apart.

Informal questioning is also discouraged. Back in 1992, Neil Kinnock (a gentleman when all’s said and done) had to rescue me from the clutches of his aides, who fell on me in large numbers after I tried to ask him an unwelcome question on his way out of the hall.

On the final evening of the last Election, I attended a tightly controlled meeting addressed by Mr Cameron, hoping to get in a question about his astonishingly lavish parliamentary expenses, still largely unknown to the public.

As he left, I slipped alongside him to pursue the matter but was shouldered brusquely aside by his muscular police bodyguard, who knew perfectly well that I was no physical threat to the Tory leader but took it on himself to guard him from unwanted queries.

And this is how a lot of it has happened. The excuse of ‘security’ has enabled our political leaders to hide within a series of concentric screens and walls, until they see almost nobody but flatterers and toadies.

There is no real chance to make them sweat in public (the worthless exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions do not count). These debates might just be such an opportunity.

I am sure that is why Mr Cameron has used every trick and dodge to avoid them. Far from breaching their impartiality, the broadcasting organisations are doing their most basic duty by trying to get him to agree to a proper adversarial clash.

Finally a snap that shows the real Dave

Modern political propaganda makes great use of faked-up pictures of unlovely combinations on the steps of Downing Street, or of men in other people’s pockets.

Well, here’s a genuine picture of a very unlovely combination at No 10 (sorry, Mrs Cameron, I don’t mean you, but if you will keep such company…) , which I had never seen before and which seems to me to tell an important truth.

Anthony Blair is by a long chalk the most universally despised politician in Britain, rightly in my view, and mainly because of the Iraq War.

Yet all the vituperation and spite of which the world is capable is aimed at Ed Miliband, who opposed the Iraq War, beat his Blairite brother for the Labour leadership and who is loathed by Mr Blair and his allies.

And the main beneficiary of this sliming of Mr Miliband is… David Cameron, who once called himself the ‘heir to Blair’, who speaks often to Mr Blair on the telephone and who has several times invited Mr Blair to Downing Street. My photograph shows an occasion in 2012 when ex-premiers gathered there to meet the Queen.

Mostly, these events are not photographed.

A ‘source’ told one journalist in 2013: ‘Cherie and Tony have been round there for drinks. Blair and Cameron get on and they like each other. He [the PM] doesn’t like Miliband or Brown, in a personal way. He is very admiring of Blair, whom he regards as a nice person and has conviction.’

I see in this picture the ghost of a rather horrible future – a grand coalition of Blairite Tory, Blairite Labour and Blairite Liberal-Democrat, none of whom can win the Election on their own, but who can together combine against all the normal people in the country.

Why Lefties love a Right-wing buffoon

Jeremy Clarkson is a Left-wing person’s idea of what a Right-wing person is like (I wish this was my own coinage, but I owe it to Andrew Platt, a contributor to my blog).

That is why the BBC have for so long been happy to give him large chunks of prime time, and why the publishing industry gives him so much space.

If Right-wingers are all foreigner-despising petrolheads who hate cyclists and think smoking is a demonstration of personal freedom, how easy they are to dismiss. Nigel Farage is a sort of political equivalent of Mr Clarkson.

The idea that Clarkson is the heroic victim of politically correct commissars is ludicrous. The petition for his reinstatement is grotesque in a world where there is so much real oppression.

If you are in the mood for signing a petition for someone who is really being persecuted, please visit change.org and sign the e-petition for the release of my friend Jason Rezaian, locked up without trial and almost incommunicado by Iran’s secret state since July last year. You can sign it here http://chn.ge/1LCNKfO

Mind the drunk trees

What is the reason for our hatred of trees? Local councils love nothing better than murdering lovely old trees in case they fall down all of a sudden.

I now see that the French government plans to massacre thousands of roadside trees because cars often collide with them.

I assume this is because the trees get drunk, rush out into the traffic and steer themselves into the cars.

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08 February 2015 12:13 AM

There are three months to go before the Election and we are already chest-deep in ludicrous partisan drivel. Funny that the more alike the parties are, the more slime they chuck over each other.

But education is a special case even in this miserable apology for a national debate. For instance, the Prime Minister is now promising an all-out ‘war on mediocrity’, which will be waged by nationalising as many schools as possible.

I suppose that means that all our children will be above average, yet another example of Mr Cameron’s strange arithmetic.

We already know he can’t tell the national debt from the deficit. He revealed in a TV documentary last week that he thinks three halves make a whole. His increase in school spending turned out to be a cut.

And, along with his Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, he didn’t dare answer a question on times tables.

Political maths, I suspect, work on a completely different principle, and have more to do with how much money you can squeeze out of a hedge-fund billionaire in a tax shelter.

Yet Ms Morgan had begun the political week by promising a new emphasis on the ‘three Rs’, and saying that all children leaving primary school should know their times tables.

Why, it was the forgotten Tory Education Secretary John Patten, in September 1992. In November 1994, another one, Gillian Shephard, launched a ‘school blueprint aimed at putting the “three Rs” at the centre of lessons’.

In January 1996, Shadow Education Secretary David Blunkett urged teachers to concentrate on the ‘three Rs’. A few days later Anthony Blair, then Opposition Leader, condemned the ‘appalling’ levels of literacy and numeracy among schoolchildren. By January 1998, these two were in office, and Mr Blunkett was demanding, yes, a return to chanting times tables.

Apparently nobody was paying attention, because a year later it was revealed that ‘schoolkids will be going back to learning their times tables tomorrow as David Blunkett scraps 30 years of trendy maths teaching’.

In September 2004, they still weren’t listening, as an academic study demanded that ‘schoolchildren should be made to chant their multiplication tables in class’.

By August 2006, the Labour Education Secretary was Alan Johnson, who proclaimed that children would be fast-tracked through their times tables in a string of reforms to the way the ‘three Rs’ were taught in primary schools.

But by December 2010 it was reported that ‘one in four 11-year-olds leaves primary school without a proper grasp of the three Rs, according to detailed Government data released yesterday’.

And lo, in June 2012, Ms Morgan’s forerunner, Michael Gove, was reported to be planning to ‘tear up the rules’ about what must be taught in primary school. Among his plans, yes... times tables were to be put back at the heart of the curriculum for children’s first years at school ‘for the first time in decades’.

There’ll be another Education Secretary along soon. Just wait for him or her to make the same pledge. And then laugh.

The only times table that actually applies to these people is the nought times table. A thousand times nought still makes nought. The only multiplication our children are reliably taught and encouraged to do is sexual reproduction.

And as long as our political leaders jointly refuse to restore order, authority and selection in the state schools, the result will be the same.

Don't fall for the sex education myth

People still mistakenly think that there is an important difference between the Tory and Labour parties over sex propaganda in schools.

On the contrary, both parties are entirely wedded to the radical sex-liberation policies of the 1960s, now the iron-bound law of the land, which it is dangerous to question, let alone disobey.

Mr Cameron, when he was still Leader of the Opposition in April 2010, had this exchange with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight:

Paxman: ‘You’re in favour of faith schools being able to teach sex education as they like?’

Cameron: ‘Not as they like. That’s not right. What we voted for was what the Government suggested in the end, which is proper sex education...’

Paxman: ‘Should they be free to teach that homosexuality is wrong, abortion is wrong, contraception is wrong?’

‘No, and the [Labour] Government discussed this and came up with a good idea, which is to say that we wanted a clearer path of sexual education across all schools, but faith schools were not given any exemption, but they were able to reflect some of their own faith in the way that this was taught.

‘But no, you must teach proper lessons in terms of gay equality and also combat homophobic bullying in schools, I think that’s extremely important.’

I’d be interested to see evidence that such teaching does actually reduce bullying.

But in any case, it’s quite clear that the ‘Conservative’ Party has no serious differences with Labour on this.

If you don’t like Tristram Hunt’s latest plans for talking about sex to tots, don’t expect any help from the Tories.

I wonder what God makes of Mr Fry

My old adversary Stephen Fry (he calls me a ‘slug’) has been attacking God on TV, calling the Ancient of Days ‘capricious, mean-minded’, 'selfish’ and ‘a maniac’.

Obviously Mr Fry, left, gets to meet God quite a lot, being so important and all, but it would be good if someone could get the Almighty to let us know what He thinks of Mr Fry.

Falling into the Islamic State trap

I absolutely decline to watch horror videos showing fanatics murdering their prisoners. I am sure it is morally wrong to do so.

I am still haunted by my decision, when I was younger, to witness two lawful executions of heinous convicted murderers.

But aside from that, I believe these zealots hope we will watch this obscenity and as a result lose our reason and launch unwise and stupid attacks on them, which will end in our moral and physical defeat. Some people are already falling into this trap.

Arming Kiev

I have never doubted for a moment that Russia is aiding the rebels in Ukraine with men and munitions, though this is difficult to prove.

What puzzles me is that so many do not seem to suspect that the USA and other Nato countries are likewise helping Ukraine’s shambolic army fight the war we urged them to start. How naive can you be? The American threats to arm Kiev’s forces may already have been carried out, but by deniable and indirect routes (as happened in Afghanistan).

I continue to be amazed at the enthusiasm in this country for getting involved in the third major European war in a century. What do we hope to gain?

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26 May 2014 3:48 PM

Readers of the supposedly diverse British press, and listeners to the BBC, might be forgiven for thinking that the main loser in last Thursday’s elections is Ed Miliband, who is ‘weird’ and cannot tackle a bacon sandwich in the properly elegant manner that is the most essential qualification for office.

Simultaneously, we are told in a survey of key marginals by that interesting man, Lord Ashcroft, that Red Ed is at the gate, like a barbarian horde, and that UKIP may give him an absolute majority of up to 80 seats, by wickedly stealing votes which really belong to the Tory Party.

Well, as so often, you can have one or the other, but not both. But on this occasion, both might turn out to be far-fetched, brain-worms, designed to wriggle into people's minds and stop them seeing what is really happening.

Arthur Koestler, recounting his frantic , darkly funny (as it was successful) flight from the Nazis as they swept down through France in 1940 in that fine book ‘Scum of the Earth’ , mentions the frequent ‘bobards’ or wild, unsubstantiated rumours which swept through the abandoned ungoverned cities and swirling flocks of ill-informed and vulnerable humanity which defeated France had by then become. As they all helped to increase fear, chaos and defeatism, he suspected that they were the work of German agents. Perhaps. Perhaps they just generated themselves out of fear mingled with ignorance.

But this stuff, about the supposed blow to Ed Miliband (and the supposed threat that he will somehow get an absolute majority) is undoubtedly the work of the Tory Party’s expensive spin machine. Having failed with the ‘fruitcake’ strategy, and then failed again with the ‘racist’ strategy, it hopes to save itself by two pincer movements.

One of these is to align with Labour’s sulking Blairites, who want Ed Miliband to lose because they prefer David Cameron, and who (correctly) think the Tory leader is a better imitation of their lost hero, the Conqueror of Fascist Iraq.

They may be on to something here. Mr Miliband has shown flashes of concern for the old-fashioned British working class, and did much to prevent our participation in what would have been a disastrous intervention in Syria. Mr Cameron, in true Blairite tradition, has done neither.

So let us pretend that the principal message of the voting results really is that Ed Miliband isn’t doing very well as Labour leader.

Eh? This is an odd, even eccentric and possibly unhinged way of reacting to the appearance, for the first time in English history, of a dangerous electoral rival to the Tories , built mainly on exiled Tory votes, led by an effective and likeable figure - and at last giving disgruntled Tories a realistic alternative to their own party’s bland and snobbish scorn for everything they believe in.

It is an even odder reaction to the fact that the Tory Party (unlike Labour, which has increased its strength) , has lost a large chunk of its European Parliament contingent, and has done rather badly in local government polls. Labour has also done reasonably, though not spectacularly well in local votes - and remains on course, as it has been for some years, to be largest single party after the 2015 general election.

By the way, UKIP would in my view have done a lot better in local polls had it fielded more candidates. Round where I live, in Oxford, UKIP simply did not stand in many wards, presumably because it lacks manpower and money. Where it did stand, it frequently did rather well, notably in South Witney in Mr Cameron’s parliamentary seat.

And it is , if I may borrow the word , a positively ‘weird’ reaction to the almost total destruction by the voters of the Liberal Democrats, prop and stay of the coalition, and the party whose previous strength propelled Nicholas Clegg into the deputy premiership. If the media gave this event proper prominence, cramming its op-ed pages and discussion programmes with loud voices urging 'Clegg Must Go!' (they are sort of mentioning it as an afterthought) Mr Clegg would not survive the week. But by playing it down, as they are, they may yet help him survive.

The other response is to continue to assume that voters are subnormal sheep, and to shriek at them ‘ Vote UKIP and you’ll let Labour in.’ You have to do this in the hope that these same sheep did not hear you when you yelled, a few minutes before, that Labour under Ed Miliband was hopeless, finished and doomed. How stupid do they think we are?

Of course, the next part of this warning would have to say: ‘And they’ll tax you to oblivion, fill the country with immigrants, mess up the economy with unpayable debt, bring in same sex marriage, concrete over the countryside, force you to pay for forests of hideous, useless windmills, many of them in your backyard or in areas of great beauty, compel you to send your children to dreadful comprehensive schools...

But this denunciation runs out of conviction as these voters count off on their fingers that the Tories are already doing all these things. Does anyone, outside the political commentariat, and outside the Republic of London, actually believe the stuff about Mr Osborne's economic recovery, which is composed entirely of press releases?

Mr Osborne borrows more every day. His new army of the 'self-employed' would be better described as 'self-unemployed'. To examine the growth figures is to intrude into private grief, and every serious economist is horrified by the housing bubble and its attendant dangers. Our main visible exports continue to be scrap metal and air, with which we pay for our Snickers bars, Pinot Grigio and iphones.

Why is it, exactly, that Tory voters should greatly fear a Miliband government? Especially the one they are likely to get, which will be a coalition with whatever is left of the Liberal Democrats at Westminster after May 2015 (more than you might think, for various reasons).

This is plainly panic. The most interesting part of the Prime Minister’s interview on the BBC ‘Today’ programme this morning was when he made a direct personal attack on Nigel Farage for having ‘his wife on the payroll’ and for his expenses. This is a subject Mr Cameron really would be wise to avoid, given his own considerable greed in the generous days before the MPs’ special Housing Benefit scheme was reined in. The rest of the media might one day wake up to this unknown matter, which they have disgracefully failed to cover. (Please see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/05/how-to-hold-an-open-meeting-in-private.html )

But that’s not the main point of mentioning this. Party leaders generally stay clear of the knuckledusters and razorblades-in-the-potato aspects of the political brawl. They affect friendship and civilized relations with their opponents, even if there is none. They concentrate on wider, loftier matters. They leave attacks of this kind to rougher creatures, with cheaper suits and less refined manners, further down the ladder of political life. Or at least they do, when they are in charge of themselves, and their advisers are in charge of them. This was the undisciplined act of a frazzled and worried man, as well it might be.

For there’s another aspect of this moment and the bizarre coverage of it (Did I really see a distinguished BBC commentator on the News Channel this morning going on at Chuka Umunna about how his leader was ’weird’? I did. A hundred thousand pounds of education, and it ends with this infantile blether? ).

Almost everyone is trying to avoid the blazingly obvious meaning of the vote – that a huge number of British voters want us to leave the European Union and to stop mass immigration – the clearest policies of the Party for which they voted.

If it was just general discontent, they could have voted for the Greens, or for Labour - currently the Opposition and so the traditional recipient of general protest votes. Or they could have stayed at home. But in significant numbers they specifically chose not to do so. They actively voted for UKIP, whose nature and aims could not have been clearer. And they continued to do so despite being sprayed with verbal slurry accusing them of bigotry and worse.

If our existing parties believed, as they claim to do, in democracy, it might cause them to wonder if their current policies, in favour of the EU and immigration, are right, or whether they should be dropped. No commercial organisation, facing such a comprehensive rejection of its product, would react by calling its customers rude names, or by pretending that they had in fact rejected the products of a rival, on which they had expressed no opinion.

But there’s no question of this, because the major parties have long seen their job as representing power to the people, rather than the other way round.

And it reminds me of the great moment when Berthold Brecht, the mordant and cynical Communist playwright, observed his East German comrades reacting angrily to a workers’ uprising in Berlin – an uprising against what was supposed to be their own state, which had cut their wages.

Brecht wrote sarcastically :’The Secretary of the Writers Union had flyers distributed in Stalin Allee that said that the People had frivolously thrown away the Government's confidence and that they could only regain it through redoubled work. But wouldn't it be easier if the Government simply dissolved the People and elected another?’

In fact the ruling Communist Party arranged ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations, led by Marxist-Leninist youths wearing shorts, carrying professionally-made banners saying ‘Our answer to the provocateurs: strong trust in the government!’ . Pictures exist. No doubt the Tories wish they could command the voters to take part in a march through the Home Counties with banners saying saying 'Trust in David Cameron is our response to the UKIP provocateurs'. But they can't.

So they have to do something else instead. They pretend that the voters haven't actually done what they have done.

Our media elite haven’t dissolved the people and replaced them, much as they would like to. The media class have just invented, in their minds, a wholly different electorate whose main aim, last Thursday, was to rebuke Ed Miliband for his poor bacon sandwich skills, and for not being his ghastly Blairite brother, whom they all for some reason admire (Is it because he still won’t say the Iraq war was wrong, unlike Ed?).

And at the moment they continue to dwell in this alternative reality, which they have made to comfort themselves. They may well stay there, much as they continued to believe (against all the clear and obvious evidence) that David Cameron would win a majority in 2010. You can’t beat wishful thinking for driving people mad.

Is anyone outside the political-media class fooled?

But the media class is clearly utterly exasperated by these annoying voters, who won’t fit in with their plan to continue Blairite government, by somehow keeping David Cameron in office after May 2015. I did, I admit, get a very low passing grade in my ‘O’ level elementary maths back in 1967. But I cannot come up with any formula by which the Tories, weaker than they were in 2010, and not blessed by the presence of Gordon Brown in Downing Street, can possibly get a majority in a UK election in 2015. Nor can I see how the Liberal Democrats can save their bacon if they don’t go into the campaign unambiguously pledged to refuse any further pact with the Tories.

And that word 'pact' brings me to the next thing. Tory ‘Eurosceptics’, those odd pushmepullyou chimeras who serve a party that is enslaved by the EU, yet claim to be severely critical of the same EU, have begun once more to talk of an electoral pact with UKIP.

I really hope nobody in UKIP is stupid enough to listen to this. It would have only one purpose – to destroy UKIP. A party whose main aim is departure from the EU cannot form a coalition with a party totally and irrevocably committed to staying in. By forming such an alliance, it would forfeit its entire position as the new, fresh outsider party, and become just one more cynical machine. I find it difficult to imagine what sort of person could even come up with such a suggestion – one who has no idea of the meaning of the word ‘principle’, I suppose. Compromise is essential. But when compromise sacrifices principle, it becomes betrayal.

As for Mr Cameron’s refrain that his is the only party promising a referendum, I am cheered by how ineffectual it is.

There’s only one way out of the EU: a party committed by unequivocal manifesto pledge to leave, being elected with a working parliamentary majority. That party will not ever be the Tories. That's why they talk of a referendum - to look as if they plan to get us out, when they really mean to lock us in forever.

Can it be that others, apart from me, can see a) that Mr Cameron is a smooth breaker of such promises, as was the case with his ‘cast-iron’ pledge over the Lisbon Treaty. He does not truly expect (or in my view want) to be in a position to keep his promise, and hopes only to save his party from near-destruction in 2015 by this ruse? b) that if by some mischance he ever was compelled to keep his promise, he would pretend to have won concessions from Brussels when in reality he had none (just as he pretended to have wielded the veto when he hadn’t, in December 2011) , and would rely on his media allies to get a vote to stay in, using scares and slanders?

But they wouldn’t do that, would they? Thank God, you cannot bribe or twist, the honest British journalist…

23 February 2014 12:02 AM

A month ago I warned that simple-minded Western intervention in Ukraine risked provoking civil war in that dangerous, unstable region.

Now I repeat the warning. Our encouragement of this post-modern putsch now threatens the worst civil violence in Europe since similar lobbies sponsored the break-up of Yugoslavia.

Worse may be on the way. Ukraine is steeped in blood and carpeted with unquiet graves. Twice in the past century it has been the scene of terrible wars, and also the site of a hideous man-made famine and of genocidal slaughter. It is also a great strategic prize – fertile wheat fields, coal mines, the crucial warm-water naval port of Sevastopol.

Now it is the gateway for the colossal new gas and oil fields around the Caspian Sea.

Most Western politicians and commentators seem to assume that the Kiev mob are democrats. Are they? In what way?

They demanded the resignation of the Ukrainian government, because they said so. They wouldn’t go home until they got their way.

How is that democratic? President Yanukovych is certainly no saint. But he came to power legitimately.

In 2010, Yanukovych won office for five years with 12.5 million votes (48.9 per cent) against 11.6 million votes (45.5 per cent) for Yulia Tymoshenko. That’s rather better than David Cameron (10.7 million, 36.1 per cent) did against Gordon Brown (8.6 million, 29.0 per cent) in our 2010 poll.

So what precisely is ‘democratic’ about demanding the immediate removal of a lawfully elected head of state, who has a year of his mandate still to run? It sounds more like mob rule to me.

And yet, on the BBC’s supposedly enlightened and thoughtful World Tonight radio programme, an academic was allowed to describe this government as a ‘regime’ without challenge, and a series of politicians from Eastern Europe were brought on to demand sanctions against Ukraine, while no voice was heard from the other side. Anyway, who are these demonstrators? There is no doubt that police have been injured by petrol bombs thrown from the crowd, and shot at with guns. Yet the reports seldom seem to ask who is doing the throwing and the shooting.

Nor do they often mention the Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), a nasty formation of violent football fans, prominent in the riots. These ‘democrats’ consider the larger Svoboda party as too namby-pamby. But you wouldn’t. Svoboda (Freedom) is led by Oleh Tyahnybok. He was once expelled from the Kiev parliament for claiming that a ‘Muscovite-Jewish Mafia’ controlled the country. Charming, eh? Kiev was the scene, in 1941, of the Babi Yar massacre of 30,000 Jews by German troops.

Many of the more fervent Ukrainian nationalists, especially those from the Western city of Lviv, are keen worshippers of the memory of a character called Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Nazis on and off between 1941 and 1945.

It is these people who have been receiving the support of the United States. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland is famous for her ‘**** the EU!’ statement in a bugged phone conversation in which she discusses naked intervention by the USA in Ukraine’s affairs.

But last December she trotted round the main square of Kiev with a little plastic bag, handing out biscuits and buns to demonstrators. Other outsiders who have sided with the anti-democratic mob have included German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, and the EU’s foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton.

Didn’t these people realise what effect their endorsement might have? Do they know what ghosts they may raise? If they don’t, they are ignorant and rash. If they do, they should remember what happens to children who play with fire.

Smart move by our Arab Prince

I was filled with admiring wonder by a picture last week of Prince Charles in full Lawrence of Arabia gear.

Could his trip (one of several in recent years) have been connected to the finalising of a contract under which BAE is supplying 72 Typhoon fighter aircraft to Riyadh? I do hope so.

BAE is one of our few remaining real industries, because (though nobody admits this) we protect it against foreign competition, and work hard to keep it in orders. The Prince is right to help.

But our continued (and perfectly justified) dealings with the Saudi despotism sit very oddly with our windbaggery over ‘democracy’ in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. One or the other. But not both.

I must Speak up for Bercow

John Bercow is one of the best Speakers the House of Commons has had in modern times. I don’t like his personal opinions (and he doesn’t like mine), but that’s not the point.

The ancient purpose of Parliament is to question and discomfort the Government. It is not the job of an MP to be a loyal footsoldier of his leader, or of the Commons to be an echo-chamber for the executive. By forcing Ministers to come to the House to answer Urgent Questions, Mr Bercow has, for the first time in decades, made Parliament live again.

It is a good thing for Britain, and a good sign that Downing Street loathes the Speaker.

Mr Bercow is also dead right to attack the organised barracking of certain politicians. This sort of thing might have been acceptable in the German Reichstag in the early 1930s (when a third of the deputies turned up in uniform). But it’s wrong here and now.

As for Mr Bercow’s wife, Sally, and her problems, I just think we should all remember that these people have young children. Certainly this has no bearing on her husband’s role as Speaker.

Drug defeatists have taken over our police forces

Why do so many senior police officers want to give up enforcing the law against drugs? Because the police force has been taken over by social workers and defeatists. And because the courts are so feeble towards drug abusers it’s not worth arresting them.

But of course the increasingly powerful drug lobby always whoop and yell whenever a chief constable muses about weakening the laws he has sworn to enforce. They know that such pronouncements help Big Dope’s campaign, which will one day unleash legal drugs on the high street.

Mike Barton, Chief Constable of Durham, is the latest. He calls for ‘decriminalisation’.

Not long ago, the BBC invited me to argue the matter out with Mr Barton in the debating chamber of the Durham Union. It wasn’t a gentle encounter.

I told him: ‘When people like you call for the laws to be further weakened, you’re taking precisely the wrong direction. You’re giving aid and comfort to the worst people in the world.’

You can see how he answered that, if you live in the North East and Cumbria, on BBC1’s Inside Out on Monday at 7.30pm.

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29 August 2013 12:46 PM

I must confess to having been distracted by our government’s almost unhinged rush to war, which is why I have taken so long to reply to Ms Vere’s contribution.

One correspondent suggests I shouldn’t do so, and I see what he means. I, too have, been tempted to refer to various Peter Simple characters during this exchange, notably Jeremy Cardhouse MP and Dr Heinz Kiosk. Alas, I suspect these references will mystify Ms Vere, who seems uninterested in these hinterland affairs. But I promised to reply, and so I will.

First of all, I must ask Ms Vere on what she bases her assertion that Margaret Thatcher had “a hatred of ‘bring-backery’.” I was an industrial, labour and political reporter during most of the Thatcher era – 1979-1990, though I was abroad or grappling with the Cold War story, during her final years in office. I regularly saw her answer questions in the Commons, from the Gallery, I listened to her conference speeches and more than once I travelled in her aircraft on foreign visits, and was able to sit in conversation with her, with a number of other travelling journalists. I have read John Campbell’s two-volume biography of her. And I confess that, if she ever did express a dislike of ‘bring-backery’, I had not noticed it. I’d be glad of some references.

I always had the strong impression that she in fact wished (whether she achieved this is another matter) to restore a number of things which she believed Britain had lost, including a sound economy, patriotism, rigorous education and national independence. You might well describe these aims as ‘bring-backery’ if you were the sort of person who thinks all motion is forwards, and that forwards is automatically good. I do not think she was such a person. Like many of her generation (which was also my parents’ generation, so well understood by me) she had seen our country decline in many important moral and spiritual aspects, was pained by this and regretted it.

On the other hand, Mr David Cameron has said he likes Britain as it is, and is well known for his dismissal of alleged fruitcakes such as me and my friend Simon Heffer for our ‘bring-backery’, though he chose to call me a ‘maniac’, which I think a larger compliment.

Has she somehow confused Mr Cameron and Lady Thatcher? Or has she recreated Margaret Thatcher in her own ‘modern’ image?

In any case, as my more regular readers have pointed out to her, the words ‘Margaret Thatcher’ are not a magic incantation here. I am not a Thatcherite and regard her as a failure, and indeed as someone who never even attempted to reverse the Left’s moral and cultural revolution, though sometimes giving the impression she was, and certainly regretting, for instance, her failure to save the grammar schools.

I think Ms Vere’s obvious ignorance of my political position (which wouldn’t matter if she hadn’t chosen to tweet her baseless jibe about school-leaving) just shows that she is uninterested in ideas. It takes about five minutes on the web to find out what my positions are on most major subjects. That sort of dismissal of ideas is common among businessmen or businesswomen, though in my view unwise. But can it be excusable in someone who seeks to be a member of Parliament? I think not. She should at least know what it is she disagreeing with.

As for the ‘A’ list, as Ms Vere presumably knows, there was never any definitive written list that was published. If she has a copy, I should be glad to see it. But in September 2009, Jonathan Oliver wrote in the ‘Sunday Times’ that ‘The Sunday Times can disclose the eclectic mix of candidates who answered the Conservative leader's appeal for people with no previous involvement in politics to stand for parliament.

‘The 70 names who have recently been added to the approved list of Tory candidates include Rory Stewart, a Harvard professor who set up a charity in Afghanistan and once taught the princes William and Harry.

‘Other would-be MPs include Merryn Myatt, a businesswoman who presented a BBC consumer show, and Colonel Bob Stewart, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for gallantry in Bosnia.

‘The list also includes the Nigerian-born Nini Adetuberu, 29, who helps drug addicts in north London, and Charlotte Vere, chief executive of a charity helping people with mental health problems. Both women are the personification of Cameron's ideal of "caring conservatism".’

I can find no record of Ms Vere complaining about this description at the time.

She then says ‘you bandied the term around as a primary school child might say ‘she smells’; as a term of shame,’

Did I? I think not. I merely said she was ‘one of the fabled A-listers’.

She then adds : ‘…but I am not ashamed. What on earth is wrong in opening up politics to people who are not policy wonks or who haven’t cut their teeth as a Special Adviser to a government minister?’

To which I reply, nothing at all. I deplore the takeover of politics by these cloned, interchangeable careerists, among whom I number the present Prime Minister, her admired leader. Does she disapprove of his path to power?

She then adds: ‘ What on earth is wrong in encouraging those of us who have started businesses, run organisations and frankly know and understand what life is like outside the Westminster bubble? Is this somehow not Conservative?’

To which I reply, that it is not conservative, if the people involved do not have conservative opinions.

It is not conservative if they are instead conscious or unconscious bearers of conventional wisdom, socially and politically liberal, entirely at ease with mass divorce, rigour-free education, radical ultra-feminism, pandemic abortion, state subsidies for fatherless families, uncontrolled mass immigration, destruction of national sovereignty through the EU, and official multiculturalism. Not to mention the increasing invasion of private and family life by the state and by commerce, and the parcelling out of children to misnamed ‘care’ while their actual parents are pressured to abandon them while they do paid work.

The opinions of MPs and candidates are, in my view, decisive. This is not a parish council we are electing, but an allegedly sovereign Parliament, and an adversarial one at that.

Note that I do not use the capital ‘C’. The Conservative Party is now a party of the Left in all but name. It didn’t intend to become one, but it did become one, by failing to understand, challenge or reverse the Left’s programme of cultural and moral change begun by the Fabians and then redoubled by Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins, before merging with Marxist and Gramscian social thought in New Labour – itself the direct heir of ‘Euro-Communism’ and the journal ‘Marxism Today’. It is the purpose of my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, to explain the shape of the modern left, and to explain that it has chosen a new route to Utopia, having acknowledged the failure of Bolshevism and of the 1945 statist experiment in Britain.

The Tories, who sought office rather than power, repeatedly compromised with these currents, until they found themselves governing along lines prescribed by the Left. The Tory Party’s broad acceptance of the openly egalitarian and politically-correct Equality Bill (mentioned below) is the single most striking feature of this process. But the Tory Party’s acceptance of comprehensive state education (Labour’s *real* Clause Four, its unalterable equality-of-outcome Holy Grail) is just as striking. This is why ideas matter, why their origins matter and why their history matters.

To respond to any mention of ideas with a yawn is to invite other people’s ideas to fly into your head through the wide and gaping entrance you have provided for them.

My main task in life is to point out this fact, that the Tory Party has gone over to the Left and is no longer in any way the friend of conservative, patriotic people. It never was much. It certainly isn’t now.

I responded to Ms Vere’s still unwithdrawn false allegation against me because I saw an opportunity to examine, in her, the force and mind of the modern Tory Party. The baseless charge she made against me could equally well have come from any Guardian-reading tweeter or ‘Comment is Free’ warrior.

That is why I suspect she is, unconsciously, an apostle of the beliefs which inform the BBC, the academy, the C of E hierarchy and the major parties. These beliefs are not in any way conservative. For such people, the function of the Tory party is to provide parliamentary representation and office for people whose tribal loyalties and social backgrounds keep them out of the Labour or Liberal Democrat Parties. They embrace policies to obtain office, rather than seeking office to implement policies. They have no principles not because they are unprincipled or wicked, but because they see no point in principles, and do not really understand why anyone should have any.

That is why I quoted Maynard Keynes on the way that ‘practical’ people who profess to be uninterested in theories are usually the slaves of some defunct economist, of whom they have never heard. Just as many people don’t even know they’re speaking in prose, many politicians don’t even know that they are guided by an ideology of which they have never heard, and which they have never studied. Such people don’t really choose what they say or think, and indeed make it very difficult for themselves to do so.

If Ms Vere is so opposed to feminism, as she says she is, why does she join and serve a party whose leading female minister, Theresa May, as I often point out, worked co-operatively with Harriet Harman on the Equality Bill and has (see below) publicly embraced the revolutionary idea of all-women shortlists (both these actions before the last election, in which Ms Vere stood in the Tory interest)?

Feminist is as feminist does. In any case, I am myself a feminist, in that I have always supported the rational treatment of women in marriage, property, education, work, the professions and law, and supported the abolition of unjustified barriers to them.

What we are dealing with, when we encounter Harriet Harman , is something entirely different. This is not feminism but a dogmatic pursuit of a gigantic revolution in the relations between the sexes, with enormous consequences for marriage, child-rearing and society.

It is based upon the (to me, extremely strange) idea that the fact that women become pregnant, and men do not, cannot justify any distinctions between men and women, in law, custom or morality. It also includes a belief that women are ‘excluded’ from various parts of our society solely by irrational prejudice - a belief which justifies the imposition of quotas upon employers and others to ensure that women are ‘represented’ in all occupations, trades and professions (well, almost all, my campaign for women to be 50% of all dustcart operatives has never quite taken off).

Mrs May’s adoption of this position was a very significant moment in British politics, (as is usual in such cases) widely ignored. She did so by supporting all-women shortlists for Parliamentary candidates in an interview with the Guardian on 14th December 2009. She had previously said (to the same paper on 10th November 1995, in an interview with Rebecca Smithers, to which I’m unable to provide a link, though perhaps a more adept user of the web might help) ‘I'm totally opposed to Labour's idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I've competed equally with men in my career, and I have been happy to do so in politics too.’

And you will also find that she makes no attempt to explain it. She does not need to explain it to Ms Orr, who is happy to welcome a new recruit into the Guardian’s world. Mrs May has bent her neck to the new orthodoxy, and they are happy enough with that . But if she claims to be a conservative, she needs to explain her adoption of such a belief to conservatives.

And Ms Vere, the alleged critic of Harriet Harman, needs to explain her allegiance to a party in which such a person is prominent, powerful and praised. She cannot attack Ms Harman and support Mrs May. One or the other. But not both.

Ms Vere says ‘I support strong families who are able to take care of their own, socially and financially.’ But families are not just economic units that take care of their own. They are private places of nurture and independent society, where individuals are free of the state and of commerce, and where tradition, morals, manners, language, stories, lore, legend, poetry and faith are passed on from generation to generation. This cannot happen if the adults and the children are largely parted from their children by the pressures of incessant work outside the home, and when Sunday has been abolished as a religious day of rest and turned into a noisy commercialised zone of retail therapy.

Another reader has pointed out, correctly in my view, the significance of the figures Ms Vere quotes on education. They result from militant, equality-of-outcome feminism (something she claims to oppose) in education.

Ms Vere next says :’We must stop pitting the beleaguered and overworked, paragon-of-virtue stay-at-home mum versus the guilty, uncaring, self-obsessed working mum. Both are ridiculous stereotypes which should be banished. And when people like you, Peter, ‘defend’ or ‘attack’ either of these stereotypes, it encourages a hardening in attitudes.’

Do I? Can I see some examples of my doing this? Who’s doing this pitting? I know perfectly well that few mothers have any choice as to whether they go out to work. I do not condemn them, but I condemn the government, and the other influences that push them into this unwanted fate. Ms Vere should read what I actually say She might then learn what I think. But does she care?

Ms Vere says : ‘Supporting dual income households by making a contribution to childcare costs is a win for the family, and a long term win for our country. All parents probably wish that they had an extended family on their doorstep, but life’s not like that and you find new ways of broadening your net.’

The assumption behind this statement is that there are two options – one that subsidised ’childcare’ is provided, the other that grandparents will step in. But what about the third possibility – that the child’s own mother does the job?

No, families of this kind, despite usually being materially worse off than their modern rivals, must be taxed to support those in which both parents do paid work, and to offer an indirect subsidy to the employers who get the main benefit.

As I’ve said, Mr Osborne will subsidise any form of child care except that done by the child’s own mother. The family which makes a substantial sacrifice to raise its own young is actively penalised, to pay for well off families which prefer money to family life, and also to pay to impose a new and revolutionary way of life on many poor families who would rather hold to the traditional way.

This is an active policy, and if I were of Ms Vere’s persuasion I would call it 'discrimination’. What it certainly is, is a policy to encourage one way of life, and discourage another. I do not think that it could possibly be described as ‘conservative’.

Then there’s this : ‘…we should make sure that by family, we mean dads too. Children need parents – both of them – and the assumption that only the mother can be the care-giver or that dividing caring responsibilities between the both parents is oooh a bit modern, is nonsense. Right from birth, the state, the media and many others inadvertently and unintentionally leave fathers out of the conversation.’

This is, once again, a dogmatic point, coming from the farthest reaches of the Sexual Liberation Front, and its claim that men and women are interchangeable. If any father wishes, or has, to be the principal carer, good luck to him. Some have to. General Boris Gromov, of the Soviet Army, who successfully led that army’s ordered retreat from Afghanistan, was a fine father to his children, of necessity, after his wife died. No doubt there are individuals who find this both congenial and good, just as there are women who would rather drive a tank, fight fires or run a corporation than nurture the young. I wouldn’t stand in their way.

But most of us, as we voyage through life, have noticed that men are different from women, and that the generality of men are not as well-equipped, temperamentally and in other ways, to raise children, especially small children, as are the generality of women. It is a sign of the unhinged nature of modern Britain that such a statement of the obvious should need to be made. You might wish to alter this, and you would be entitled to your opinion. But to do so you must embark on a revolution. Why would a conservative pursue such an aim?

Finally, I’ll respond to this : ‘…parents in dual-income households take care of their children too! They do phonics, ride bicycles, bake cupcakes, go on trips, help with homework etc etc. The assumption that going to work results in a complete abrogation of young-raising responsibility is narrow-minded and frankly offensive.’

I make no such assumption. How could I? The great conscript army of wageslave mothers struggle home nightly to try to win back some of what they have lost in the day, and try mightily to do so. They know what they’re missing. But time once gone, especially quantity time with young children, cannot be brought back – a truth that all parents of all sorts know, as they gaze in amazement at their adult offspring and wonder where the time went and how it all happened so quickly.

It just happens to be my opinion, and that of significant numbers of other parents, notably of the various campaigns for full-time mothers which have over the past dozen years been given the brush-off by the Tories, that the presence of a full-time mother in the home is *better* than the absence of one.

I would expect an avowedly socialist or liberal party to scorn such a view. The thing that interests me is that the party which proclaims itself to be Conservative is on that side as well. Ms Vere is welcome to her funky, radical views, even if she doesn’t know they’re funky and radical. But what business has she standing for Parliament while calling herself a ‘Conservative’? That’s what this is about.

By the way, I have never mentioned the 1950s, and I don’t ’hark back’ to any era. I can remember the 1950s, and there was plenty wrong with them, as I make plain in my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’. I yearn for no ‘golden age’. I just yearn for the good in preference to the bad, at all times and in all places.

Loyalty to tribe seems to me to guide Ms Vere more strongly than interest in ideas, their origin and outcome. That’s why she’s in a party that calls itself conservative and isn’t.

As for me being the ‘arbiter of conservatism’ (I am certainly not the arbiter of Conservatism) , I should have thought the test was to be found elsewhere.

I have much experience of the enemies of conservatism, and much of my view of what it is has been formed by finding out in detail what happens when conservatism, in the form of faith, tradition, patriotism, privacy, liberty, limited government and the rule of law is defeated and cast aside.

Ms Vere thinks this is all dull, irrelevant stuff, bring-backery and ‘harking back to yesteryear’, and other silly jibes that belong in G2, on ‘Woman’s Hour’ or in the New Statesman. But I also look for definitions in history and thought, particularly in Christianity, in the ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ of Edmund Burke, on the voluminous work done by such people as Patricia Morgan on the family, and of John Marks and others on education. I may not be able to define it, nor would I want to. I’ve had enough of ideological politics to last several lifetimes. But I do know what it is not, and I do know who its enemies are.

If a party fails to stand up for the rule of law, embraces egalitarianism, sneers at tradition, weakens the free family, threatens national independence and liberty, destroys good things and replaces them with worse ones, tears up our beloved countryside for gain, engages in sordid jingoism and warmongering, then it is not conservative.

There is no trades descriptions law in British politics, or who knows what would happen? But it is surely morally wrong for this collection of social and moral liberals to stand before the electorate and call themselves by that name.

By the way, I have absolutely no idea what ‘opportunity cost’ has to do with it. It doesn’t sound like a principle, or even a disposition. It sounds like the rattling of a desiccated calculating machine.

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11 March 2013 1:14 PM

Now that the Cameron Delusion has exploded in a miniature mushroom cloud of dead ducks, rusty wind farms, broken promises, and the bristling moustaches of infuriated activists , the doomed Tory Party are once again looking for a new false hope. They have got the sticky-backed plastic and the old washing-up bottles out, plus a few bowls of papier-mache, and are trying to construct a new hope out of the Rt Hon Theresa May MP. The media voices that once told us that Mr Cameron could lead the Tories out of the Wilderness of Zimmer, or wherever it is they have been wandering since the fall of Mrs Thatcher, are now proposing Mrs May as the New Mrs Thatcher. This would be very funny if it were not also very sad.

I suspect this has a lot to do with Mrs May’s attractive, resourceful and hard-working special adviser, Fiona Cunningham, who in my limited experience is a good deal more animated and adventurous than the Home Secretary. I have noticed Ms Cunningham appearing recently in news pictures with her boss. This is a development frowned upon in the civil service. Officials who get into the picture generally have to buy cakes all round for the whole private office. But I applaud it. We should know more about these important figures. Special advisers (Spads for short) are often hugely significant people, whose influence is often forgotten. They are also, in many cases, the Cabinet Ministers of the day after tomorrow. This is partly because they are often the main link between senior politicians and the national media and so understand very well the important relation between these two elites, explored in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ but largely unknown to the public.

I cannot say if this is the case with Ms Cunningham, since I have not made any great efforts to ( as the phrase goes) 'get alongside' . I have the impression Mrs May doesn’t much like me, and I can quite understand why that mioght be so. Fortunately, I have no great desire to be liked by politicians.

I have often pointed out that Mrs May is in fact hugely politically correct. I have compared her to Labour’s Harriet Harman, and pointed out that the two women got on rather well during the passage of Labour’s Equality Act, which Mrs May was meant to be opposing. The Act pretty much set in concrete European Union directives on ‘Equality and Diversity’ which have turned this slogan (a polite expression for Political Correctness) into Britain’s official ideology. This profound change has led very quickly to the official dethroning of Christianity in English law, as the ultimate source of law, and the ultimate test of good.

It is not just me saying this. In ‘The Times’ of 24th November 2011, we read (in an article by Anushka Asthana) :

‘Britain's equality chief has praised Theresa May, the Tory Home Secretary, arguing that she fights just as hard for women's rights as Labour's fiercest advocates on the issue.’

The article said that Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, had (like me) compared Mrs May to Harriet Harman . It recounted ‘But Mr Phillips said that he was just as impressed by the Tories' most senior female figure. “Theresa May, in my opinion, is just as aggressive as Harriet Harman was on women's equality,” he said. “Equality is an issue that can transcend politics, and we should judge people not on their political label but what they are doing and what they deliver.” Mr Phillips is also recorded as having praised Mrs May for resisting pressure to do a U-turn on the Equality Act and fighting off attempts to remove workplace protections for women.’

Somehow or other this person is now being portrayed as a ‘New Iron Lady’, because of some neo-liberal stuff on privatising helath and education (which, whatever it is, is not conservative) and because she is making promises (on which she must be pretty sure she will never be tested ) to repeal the Human Rights Act.

Is this credible? Back in December 2009, Mrs May was puffed by the Guardian in an admiring interview, during which she let slip that she now favoured all-women shortlists for the selection of Tory candidates This was the same Mrs May who, in an earlier incarnation, had said (in 2002): ‘: 'I'm totally opposed to Labour's idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I've competed equally with men in my career, and I have been happy to do so in politics too.'

I would also like to harp on here about Mrs May’s curious portrayal of her own education. She repeatedly says in official reference books that she went to Wheatley Park Comprehensive School, a reasonably well-regarded rural comp, based on an old manor house outside the samll town or large village of Wheatley, a few miles to the East of Oxford.

Actually, it is not quite that simple. She attended a private convent school till she was 13. Then in 1969, she went (presumably after passing a selective exam) to Holton Park, a girls’ grammar school. In 1971, two years later, this was merged with Shotover School, a nearby mixed sex secondary modern, and became Wheatley Park Comprehensive. It was normal practice, during such mergers, for the existing grammar school pupils to continue in a ‘grammar stream’ until the end of their education. I cannot say for certain that it was the case during Mrs May’s schooling, but it is highly likely.

Now, I know of at least one former Labour MP who described his school (in reference books) as a ‘comprehensive’ even though the city in which he was educated had no comprehensive schools at the time, and the school involved was a secondary modern. He was so keen to emphasise that she had undergone this egalitarian baptism, that he overcame this little detail( and in truth there’s not much difference between most comps and most secondary moderns). I can see why a committed socialist might want to blue the boundaries.

But why would a Conservative MP, in describing her schooling, choose to describe it so? The Tories say emphatically that they won't build any new grammar schools, but they sort of acknowledge they were a good thing and won't (for now) destroy the few remaining ones. I think it is at least interesting, and not very encouraging to those who fancy that Mrs May is some sort of saviour from the right.

Then of course there is her description of the Tories in 2002 as ‘The Nasty Party’. Few doubted that she intended to strike at those who were resisting the moral, social and cultural revolution launched by New Labour, then very much under way. As for the praise she gets for avoiding the political traps into which previous Home Secretaries have fallen, let us note here that the main source of those traps was always the old Home Department’s responsibility for prisons , Judges and courts – which has now been handed over to the Ministry of Justice. (Just as all countries which have Ministries of Culture tend to be cultural deserts, countries with Justice Ministries tend to be pretty short of justice, but that’s a discussion for another time).

Now, what has such a person got against the Human Rights Act, or the Court? In my view, I can’t see why she should quarrel with it on any principle.

What did she actually say? I haven’t so far been able to obtain a full copy of her speech. But this is one key passage : ‘We need to stop human rights legislation interfering with our ability to fight crime and control immigration. That's why, as our last manifesto promised, the next Conservative government will scrap the Human Rights Act, and it's why we should also consider very carefully our relationship with the European Court of Human Rights and the Convention it enforces. When Strasbourg constantly moves the goalposts and prevents the deportation of dangerous men like Abu Qatada, we have to ask ourselves, to what end are we signatories to the convention? Are we really limiting human rights abuses in other countries? I'm sceptical.’

She also said : ‘By 2015 we'll need a plan for dealing with the European Court of Human Rights. And yes, I want to be clear that all options - including leaving the Convention altogether - should be on the table.’

Now, those who were diddled by Mr Slippery’s ‘pledge’ of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty should recall how important the detailed language turned out to be. The Slippery Team managed to argue that Mr Cameron’s pledge was annulled by the fact that the Treaty had been ratified (I always note here the very interesting fact that this ratification was not achieved until after the Tory conference of that year, so sparing the Slippery Team from having to make this rather tattered defence in front of a hall full of actual Tory Party members).

Now, Mrs May here speaks of ‘The next Conservative Government’. Well, when will that be, say the Bells of Old Bailey? Even if Mr Nigel Farage is silly enough to offer the Tories some kind of pledge in 2015 (and if he does this he will drive his party straight over a cliff), the Tories cannot win the next election (or the one after, or the one after that). As I have been pointing out now for at least seven years, the Tories will never again form a majority in a United Kingdom Parliament. So pledges of this kind are not just post-dated cheques. They are cheques signed in invisible ink, drawn on a non-existent account. We all know what happened to Mr Cameron’s ‘British Bill of Rights’ (he seems not to know we already have one) and the commission set up to look into it. Mrs May’s pledge is from the same dodgy shop, the sort which, when you take your wonky goods back a week later, has whitewash smeared on the window and a sign saying ‘Closed!’ upon the door.

As for the ‘option’ of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, an option is presumably a choice. Thus, what she has actually said is that a *choice* of leaving or not leaving the ECHR (in which she might take the choice of staying in) will be *on the table* (which does not mean that it would be adopted, or that she would adopt it, or that it couldn’t also be snatched *off* the table at a later stage) and all this would only happen *if the Tories win the next election*, which of course they will not do.

My goodness, this is not tough talk. Cloud Cuckoo Land, or the summit of Kanchenjunga, seem accessible by comparison with these remote and unattainable conditions, as does a nice slice of Pie in the Sky, and an attractive holiday in a Castle in the Air (paid for in full, in advance). Anyone who is taken in by it deserves everything he gets.

We are back with my favourite derisive rhymes – ‘With a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the houses in between’, and ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs’. Indeed we could. I think it is best summed up by pointing out that, if Mrs May were a verb, she would be no more definite or reliable than her pledges. Why do people take this sort of thing seriously? For the same reason people believe all kinds of daft things – because they want to. Why do they want to ? Because they’d rather not realise how bad things really are. And so on. Thus universal suffrage democracy marches onward to the cliff-edge, singing as it goes.

03 March 2013 12:22 AM

Suicide is a deep well of grief, reproach and guilt. But it is not an argument.

When someone kills himself, we offer our deepest sympathy to those left behind, as I do to the family of Edward Thornber, the Manchester schoolboy who ended his own life after being caught with cannabis.

But we must not blame ourselves. In the end, those who take this sad step are the only ones responsible for it.

I know that some will accuse me of harshness and cruelty, even for discussing this. Please believe me when I say that this accusation is mistaken.

It is important that we do discuss it, rather than letting the argument be overwhelmed by emotion, however keenly felt.

I am disturbed by the portrayal of this case.

The story, as told in the papers, is full of signposts telling us what we ought to think. We are told the amount of the drug was small. So what? This is a drug usually sold in small quantities.

The suggestion is strongly made – in reports of the inquest – that the young man took his life because the police enforced the law against him. There may be actual direct evidence of this, but I have not seen it reported anywhere.

But what if this is so? Are the authorities to be paralysed into ceasing to enforce the law, by the fear that those they prosecute will commit suicide?

If a person dreads punishment so much, why would he freely commit the crime that leads to it?

If we follow this rule, it will be impossible to prosecute anyone, for fear that the defendant will be so distressed that he takes his life when arrested and charged.

Whatever caused this tragedy, it was not the fault of the police, who caught him, or of the officials who processed the case.

It is the job of the police to enforce the law, and it is the sad truth that Edward Thornber had knowingly broken that law not once but twice.

He knew cannabis was against the law. He had been detected with it once. He should have known that a conviction would threaten his freedom to travel to the US.

It is not the fault of the police that he still chose to take this risk – twice.

Most of us would be prepared to treat a single first offence as a silly mistake. But two?

The only criticism I would make of the police applies to their politically correct, defeatist leadership.

This whole affair was made possible by their unpublicised, sneaky, unofficial decriminalisation of cannabis by shirking their legal duty and not enforcing the law against it.

This policy, never placed before Parliament, gives many young people the impression that our drugs law is wholly dead, when in fact it is only half dead.

If the law had been strongly and consistently applied during the past 40 years, schoolboys would never take the terrible risk of toying with this dangerous, mind-bending substance, increasingly correlated with severe and irreversible mental illness.

And many lives, not just that of Edward Thornber and his family, would have been spared tragedies of many different kinds.

Weakness is not the same thing as compassion.

A perfect chance to terminate the Tories

You have to say one thing for the Prime Minister. His strategy of driving away the Tory Party’s traditional supporters is a roaring success.

The other bit of the plan, in which thousands of Guardian readers and Labour voters would flock to Mr Slippery’s rainbow banner, hasn’t quite worked out. It never will.

The Tories are now (in my view rightly) loathed and despised by people from all political viewpoints and all walks of life.

What next? Well, if I may make one suggestion to any remaining Tory diehards who think that this party is worth sticking to, you’re wrong.

What the Eastleigh result shows is not that UKIP is on the way to office.

It shows that (as I have been trying to tell you for about seven years) the Tory Party isn’t. It will never again win a UK Election.

Even if you’re still deluded enough to believe that a Tory government would be any use to you, nothing that you do will change the outcome of the next Election. It’ll either be a Labour administration or a Lib-Lab one, which is the same thing.

This is your chance to sweep away a party whose time has gone, which long ago ceased to be what it claimed to be, which despises its own supporters, which has now added failure to fraud and treachery as its chief characteristics.

Don’t work or vote for it. If you feel for some odd reason that voting is a duty, vote for UKIP. Britain’s Left-wing elite truly fear the destruction of the Tory Party that would follow a thumping defeat of the kind it deserves.

They rightly see its existence as a barrier to the birth of a truly pro-British party, one that could sweep New Labour, the Liberal Democrats and all their works into the sea.

I’ll be amazed if we get another chance of escape as good as this.

Fancy meeting one of these in your garden?

You think urban foxes are a problem? I've been spending a few days in Moscow, Idaho, where huge Canadian timber wolves can be heard howling on snowy nights, and sometimes wander into the suburbs.

You can get into big trouble if you shoot these hungry monsters, madly reintroduced to the area by environmentalists.

I asked a friend what I should do if I met one as I walked down the street. 'Climb a tree and hope for the best,' he growled.

Plans for a full-scale replica of the Titanic, intended to cross the Atlantic all the way without sinking this time (and how can they be so sure?), made me wonder what other appalling disasters mankind has tried to re-enact.

I could only think of the John Major government, which we are now having for the second time around, only without all the good bits.

While we gibber and squawk about a supposed threat from Iran, we foolishly ignore the stealthy, ever-intensifying transformation of Nato member Turkey into a repressive Islamic republic.

Proposed new uniforms for Turkish Airlines female staff, including fez-style hats and vast, enveloping skirts, might alert the slowest mind to what is going on, even the Economist magazine.

Then again, they might not.

I cannot feel anger at Anthony Blair over the Iraq War which he still absurdly defends. I am quite sure he never understood what he was doing. Those who created him out of nothing, and those who were willingly fooled by him, are the ones to blame.

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07 January 2013 1:58 PM

Mr Slippery has been annoying UKIP again, calling them ‘Odd People’. Well, I can’t complain, having called them ‘Dad’s Army’ for some time myself, and jeered at one of their MEPs for saying women should clean behind the fridge. But then, I’m not trying to get UKIP votes, whereas Mr Cameron, at least theoretically, does want those votes.

Talking about the 1990s, she asked him : ‘But those were thankless, wilderness years – surely he must have wondered if the whole enterprise was mad? "Um, I didn't think the concept was mad. I thought the people, in many cases," and he starts to laugh, "were not to my taste”.

"UKIP in the 1990s, the people in it and who voted for it were in the main 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells'. I mean, you look down the membership list in 1994, anyone below a half colonel was a nobody," he hoots. "I used to say you could always tell it was a UKIP meeting by the number of Bomber Command ties in the room. It was that generation." Was it his milieu? "No! I was the odd one out. Which I loved, of course. I've always liked to be the odd one out, wherever I am."’

I wonder, myself, whether those members have all gone.

Interestingly, Mr Farage does a bit of back-pedalling on drugs, but it is so unprincipled that it doesn’t in any way soften my criticisms of him and his party. Here’s the passage. Ms Aitkenhead writes: ‘But his party's enthusiastic libertarianism goes out of the window when it comes to a pleasure its core members aren't so keen on – illegal drugs. Farage's own instinct would be for wholesale decriminalisation – which would almost certainly broaden UKIP's appeal among younger urban voters – but the policy isn't even up for debate. "It would be completely impossible for me to win that debate within the party. And a general doesn't try to fight every battle."’

But back to Mr Slippery and his ‘odd people’. From the point of view of a very rich, privately-educated stockbroker’s son, who is married to a wealthy sprig of the nobility and who has never suffered from inarticulacy or a feeling of inferiority in his entire life, any political activist is going to seem odd. People such as Mr Cameron have believed all their lives that those who have strong views about things are in some way eccentric and a bit barmy. His Eton schooling and above all his immersion in the Oxford School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics will have told him that it is only the little people, the excluded and the disappointed, who dare to care about politics, and engage their passions in it. He has been taught that such feelings are beneath him, and that real commitment to any cause is mistaken and silly.

Party activists, from his Olympian position, can seem rather pathetic, odd and strange. Not for them the calm, opulent detachment of the elite. These are people for whom a new policy can spell bankruptcy, or penury , or wounded grief . Why, they feel their country’s woes as a personal pain.

In a world where normality means that the thrifty and hard-working end their lives in solitude and straitened circumstances, being ordered about by cruel care-workers, while the tricky, the violent and spendthrift are indulged by a complacent state, a bit of oddity is welcome.

To the disappointed inhabitants of New Britain , Mr Slippery and Michael Heseltine may seem unloveable, whereas more normal human beings, who have lived real lives of striving and disappointment such as Norman Tebbit, seem much more appealing (note how Lord Tebbit is still loathed and scorned by the liberal bigots).

By the way, I’ve noticed a growing tendency to suggest that in some way a vote for UKIP will aid a Labour victory at the next election. There is a very simple reason why people thinking of deserting the Tories for UKIP should not be influenced by it. *The Tories will not win anyway*. This was the case at the last election, where even the wild, inflated campaign of nonsensical rage against Gordon Brown (who was in fact joint Saviour of the Poond Sterling, along with Ed Balls) could not get the Tories a majority.

Now that people have seen what the Tories are really like ( and spotted that , as Mr Farage says, the Liberal Democrats are not the reason for their failure, but a useful alibi for what they planned to do anyway) , they are bound to do even worse than they did in 2010.

Labour will form the next government, probably as a minority, perhaps with Liberal Democrat or even SNP support, though there is a faint possibility that they will get a majority and a chance that they will form a coalition with a purged Liberal Democrat party led into the general election by Vince Cable.

The old and usually reliable rule, under which a party that can’t score 50% in polls in mid-term will not get a majority at the general election, seems to suggest that Labour will fall short of outright victory. But the Tories will do far, far worse. It simply won’t be possible to get people to loathe Ed Miliband the way they loathed Mr Brown. The idea of Mr Miliband as a hate figure is as unworkable as the phrase ‘feral guinea pig’ .

Last Sunday’s Mail on Sunday poll showed that, even without the UKIP surge, Labour would get a wafer-thin overall majority, if actual votes were based on current voting intentions. The idea that UKIP would therefore rob the Tories of a majority is not workable. The Tories have no majority of which they can be robbed, nor will they ever again achieve such a majority in the United Kingdom under anything approaching existing boundaries.

But is the idea that we can get from the current mess to a revived British politics in the course of one election is equally unworkable. It’s a ten or 15-year project, which, alas, has yet to begin. The real tragedy is that so many Tory tribalists insisted on voting for that awful, treacherous party in 2010, so postponing the necessary death of the Conservatives and their replacement. Let’s hope they are not similarly fooled again in 2015.

12 August 2012 12:03 AM

It seems that you can now be arrested for not smiling when an Olympic event is taking place. So I had better watch out in case I am wrestled to the ground and carted off by some Compulsory Happiness snatch squad.

For I have not been smiling nearly enough. I have watched two or three races on the TV.

There is still something thrilling in a raw contest among men and women stretched to the uttermost, in which there can be only one winner.

It is refreshingly unlike modern Britain, where the very idea that there must be losers for there to be winners is banned from most schools, and denied by our political leaders.

But I can summon up little interest in all the other alleged sports, dancing animals, underwater basketball, bikini display or whatever they are. As a lifelong cyclist, I find myself startlingly unmoved by Olympic cycling.

It is too technological, too dependent on machines and airlocks.

The riders look like aliens in their special outfits.

But good luck to you if you have enjoyed it. I am happy for you, provided I’m allowed to differ from you. The trouble is, I’m not sure I am.

From the moment these Olympics started, there’s been a strong smell of New Labour totalitarianism.

Those who have dared to say they didn’t like the Opening Ceremony have been lectured and made to feel isolated.

The BBC even transmitted an astonishing personal attack on me in which I was misrepresented (they have since apologised, an event as rare as a Lottery win, but alas the apology is nothing like good enough).

Now someone called Armando Iannucci, who is famous for something, has called me a ‘scribbling cynic’ and proclaimed that I and those like me ‘took a hell of a beating’.

I think this is because the British team has won a lot of medals, and the Opening Ceremony has been much praised.

I can’t see why an Olympic opening ceremony should have any politics in it at all. But remember how deeply the Blairite Cosa Nostra was involved in securing the Olympics for London at all costs, and how their heirs, the Cameron Tories, have taken up the baton.

Why? I think the pitiful failure of the Millennium Dome rankled badly with the Blairites. They were and are revolutionaries. They had long hoped to use the new century to proclaim Year One of their nasty, tatty, multicultural, anti-Christian New Britain.

Put simply, I think they wanted to undo the magic of the 1953 Coronation Ceremony, with modernist incantations and a censored, reordered version of our national history.

The Olympics were a second chance, in which a normal love of sport could be converted into an anti-conservative wave of feeling.

And behold, they have done it. I don’t begrudge the winners their joy, or the spectators their delight.

But do Olympic medals make a nation great? Was the USSR a great nation because it won lots of them? Is Jamaica a stable and happy society because Usain Bolt is a great athlete? Would you rather have Australia’s thriving economy, or Britain’s medal tally? And by the way, have Prince William and his wife forgotten that they are future monarchs of Australia?

In a free country, there is no obvious connection between sporting achievement and national standing. The truth is that we have used scarce money to hire coaches, buy equipment and subsidise athletes in sports where competition is weak.

When all this is over, we will still be broke, disorderly, badly educated and gravely troubled by the greatest wave of mass immigration in our history. I cannot see why I should smile about that.

Ludicrous Louise is onle the first to wander off

When Louise Bagshawe changed her name to Mensch, it was a great loss to comedy.

This wonderful, ludicrous woman seems to have stepped out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel, one of those terrifying, strapping girls who thinks the stars are God’s daisy-chain.

And ‘Bagshawe’ was perfect for the part, in a way that the rather Manhattan moniker ‘Mensch’ isn’t.

Louise, who once got very cross with me when I said she had the political grasp of a Teletubby, symbolises the whole Cameron project. She wandered into and out of New Labour, as one might amble into and out of a bar or a shop.

As she explained: ‘My mother crystallised the issue by deciding to run as a Conservative in the county council elections and drafting me in to help. I said, originally, “I can’t, I’m in the Labour Party.” She said, “Don’t be so stupid.” ’

Quite. And now she has wandered out of Parliament, leaving the poor people of her Northamptonshire seat wondering why this exotic creature was foisted on them in the first place.

A lot of the modern Tory Party is just as vague in principle or purpose. Their only aim in 2010 was to get into office, which is why they could happily make a deal with Liberal Democrats, who were – officially – their sworn enemies.

Now it is clear that the whole empty project has run out of fuel. Louise is just the first of them to be wafted elsewhere on the winds of fashion and expediency.

The Government has no purpose except to stay in office. It will do so by splitting with the Lib Dems and forming a powerless minority administration.

In 2015, the Lib Dems under Vince Cable will form a coalition with Labour, and in return they will get the elected senate and rigged parliamentary elections they want.

There’s no escape. There might have been if only you lot had listened to me, and not voted Tory in 2010.

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I have never got on with Jon Snow, the Left-wing presenter of Channel 4 News. He once called me a Hitlerite in Reykjavik (it’s a long story).

But I gather (not from him) that he has been working very hard indeed researching the rules and jargon of all the Paralympic sports as he prepares to commentate on them so that he can get it right. I salute him for it.

Unlike the dubious Olympics, the Paralympics are pure virtue: no cheating, no drugs, just people who despise self-pity, rising above pain and adversity and showing us all what it can mean to be human, if you try.

**************************************************************

Who does William Hague speak for when he pledges this country’s support for the Syrian rebels?

My correspondents in Syria loathe these Islamist gangsters and are enraged by the Western media’s uncritical endorsement of them – the oxygen that keeps them going.

The most striking story of the week from Syria was the riveting account by British photographer John Cantlie of how he was kidnapped and nearly murdered in Syria by Islamist fanatics.

The worst and most murderous were British subjects from South London.

But because this account does not fit the ludicrous conventional wisdom that the Syrian rebels are heroes, it has not been followed up.

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15 May 2010 6:29 PM

Right then, all you Tory loyalists who put your trust in David Cameron. Are you pleased with what you got in return for your blind faith in the Dear Leader?

I specially address my jeers and hoots of derision to those who claimed that Mr Cameron had some secret pro-British agenda, and was waiting until after the Election to unleash it.

Oh, yes, that one turned out to be right, didn't it?

Can't you see how pleased he was to be in this very civil partnership with the Liberal Democrats? Perhaps that was always his true 'secret agenda'.

The talks between the Tories and the Liberals were quite astonishingly swift and harmonious, weren't they? Is it possible that exploratory discussions on such a plan took place long before May 6?

No doubt such an idea will be vigorously denied, because if it is true it will serve to show just how profoundly cynical, dishonest and, yes, I'll use the word - treacherous - the Tory campaign was in every respect.

At Mr Cameron's sole press conference during the Election campaign (that's right, he held just one, so scared was he of unpredictable questioning), I asked him if he was politically closer to Nick Clegg or Norman Tebbit.

He flannelled, but didn't answer. Now he has.

Not merely does he agree with Nick. He disagrees with himself.

Without a passing sigh, Mr Cameron has tossed his few token conservative policies in the bin.

It doesn't seem to have cost him much pain, does it? Abolish the Human Rights Act? Don't be silly. Whoever thought I meant that?

Cut inheritance tax? Oh, did you take me seriously?

Actually we'll be coming after the responsible and thrifty middle classes with a whopping increase in capital gains tax instead.

Oh, and employees will be paying the National Insurance rise anyway. Sorry, didn't mean that either.

My guess is that the tax gimmick for married couples, for what it's worth, will go down the plumbing, too.

Meanwhile, we are faced with slippery constitutional changes which will bring this country to within one inch of being a rather authoritarian Republic.

And we will have to endure the continuing triumph of political correctness, well-symbolised by the elevation to the Home Office (also in charge of 'equality') of the Tory Queen of PC, Theresa May.

Don't expect much of a fight against crime or disorder from that quarter, let alone a serious curb on immigration.

Well, now that millions of Tory loyalists have been taken for mugs, as the two callow Con-Dem comrades giggle, preen and smile, what are those loyalists going to do?

Fool me once, goes the old saying, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The choice must be made now.

Those who stay in the Tory Party in the face of this insult to their loyalty and their intelligence will - like all those who compromise with a conqueror or an invader - eventually talk themselves into accepting their subjugation.

Now is the time to strike, when it can do real damage to this very nasty new Government.

Proper Conservative MPs, party officials and members alike should spend this week urgently considering breaking away from the Heir to Blair and taking as much of the party with them as they can.

Otherwise there is nothing but Left-wing government ahead of us, stretching out till the crack of doom.

The bad science of drugging boys

A shocking £31million is spent each year on prescriptions for powerful mind-altering drugs given to children with the fictional complaint called ADHD.

This should stop immediately, as should the large payments of Disability Living Allowance to many of the families involved.

There is no objective diagnosis for 'ADHD', a complaint invented by psychiatrists and drug companies.

Its alleged 'symptoms' are felt not by supposed patients but by exasperated adults trying to cope with boys (it's mainly boys) who get too little exercise, sleep and authority, watch too much TV, play too many computer games, eat and drink junk food and are then forced to endure school lessons of crushing boredom conducted by women who don't understand small boys.

I continue to be amazed all the 'Bad Science' gurus have not turned their searchlights on this fantasy.

Sermon from the Church of Europe

I wonder what the Queen thinks about the strange pro-EU service which took place in the nation's church, Westminster Abbey, last Sunday.

The flag of the EU - a body which specifically refused to have any Christian element in its constitution - was carried solemnly into the Abbey in procession.

An extract from the Schuman Declaration which began the whole EU project (not, so far as I know, a Christian document) was read from the Great Pulpit.

For some reason the congregation were also compelled to listen to a Bulgarian folk song whose mysterious words include the line 'If it is a boy from our village playing, I will love him only until lunchtime.

'If it is a stranger, I will love him for ever.'

Prayers were said for the European Commission and for the European 'Parliament'. One declared 'Lord God our Father, we affirm our commitment to the European Union'.

A politically-correct sermon was delivered by an Anglican clergyman who ought to have known better.